Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden

Author:Mark Bowden [Bowden, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

There is no evidence that American soldiers and CIA agents—gray-uniformed or otherwise—had been involved, but if that was one of Pablo's fears, his escape would make it come true. Four days after he left La Catedral, a team of Delta Force operators led by Colonel Jerry Boykin arrived in Bogotá. Ambassador Busby's request for Delta, much to his surprise, had sailed through Washington. The State Department had approved it and passed it up to the White House, where President Bush had consulted with Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and then instructed Secretary of Defense Cheney to give Busby anything he needed.

Eight very fit men dressed in civilian clothes were met at El Dorado Airport by midlevel embassy officials and driven downtown, moving swiftly along roads that in daylight would be choked with traffic. Busby, Toft, and Wagner were waiting in the vault. Busby and Boykin were old friends, and after a few minutes of getting caught up, the ambassador began briefing Boykin on the situation. It was, to say the least, confusing.

Boykin's team had taken the assignment hoping to go after Pablo themselves, especially given the clumsy track record of the Colombians in the months before his surrender. Delta specialized in this kind of quick, dirty strike. They trained constantly and could move rapidly on any target anywhere, day or night. Their official orders typically explained the what and why of the mission without spelling out the how. Their commanding officer, General William F.Garrison, was a veteran at these kinds of covert ops, ever since his work on the Phoenix program in Vietnam, where suspected Vietcong leaders were assassinated in retaliation for killings of village leaders who were less than enthusiastic about communism. Garrison was not one to shy away from an assassination mission. But Delta's plan had been vetoed emphatically by U.S. Army Southern Commander, General George Joulwan when he'd met with Boykin before the men flew down.

"No, you're not going to do it yourself," he had instructed Boykin. Joulwan knew how easy it was for these "black" special ops guys to fly beneath the army's command radar, and he knew they wanted to do the job themselves. As far as he was concerned, the potential political and legal fallout of such a mission would eclipse its benefits.

But if the Colombians took all this training, intelligence, and guidance and went out and shot somebody while trying to arrest Escobar, the U.S. mission stayed comfortably within the law. Officially, the Delta operators were not to participate in raids. Joulwan wanted them to get out there and show the Colombian police how to track this son of a bitch down.

Busby also conveyed the urgency of the situation. He and the staff at the embassy had been working around the clock ever since Pablo's escape. Steve Murphy, the DEA agent with the well-worn Spanish-English dictionary, had subsisted on coffee and donuts for so long, without sleep, that when he felt his heart fluttering oddly in his chest he took a break to go have his heart checked at the embassy dispensary.

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